Today’s reading is Luke 20: 27-47

Today we see more testing of Jesus.  Now, you may be wondering, why, all of a sudden, do we see test after test of Jesus?  What is this all about?  Well He is now in Jerusalem.  He’s playing on their home field, to use a sports analogy.  So, all the religious leaders come after Him to test Him.

Today, we see an interesting test. We see the Sadducees come to test Jesus.  Now, the Sadducees were the “priestly” class. They were the ones that served in the Temple, the chief priest would have been a member.  The text also says something interesting.  It says that they asked Jesus a question about the resurrection.  But they didn’t believe in the resurrection.

First, why didn’t they?  The Sadducees only believed that the Pentecuck, the Books of Moses were truly inspired.  They did not view the rest of the Old Testament with the authority that they gave to the first five books.  And, in their opinion, nowhere in the first five books is resurrection explicitly mentioned.  So, because of that, they didn’t believe in the resurrection.

But notice, they were willing to use something that they didn’t even believe in to try to trip up Jesus. That is why Jesus gives such an extreme and hyperbolic answer.  He’s playing along with them, showing the absurdity of their question.  And in doing He finally silenced them.

It’s a shame they were so looking for ways to trip up Jesus that they weren’t able to listen to Jesus and learn from Jesus. That’s a good lesson for us, in many ways. Sometimes we focus on the things that we really can’t understand or don’t truly know instead of focusing on what we do know.  They didn’t do that and because of that, they missed Jesus.

May we not make that same mistake.

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